brigitte downey

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CHAPTER ONE

 

I worked as a cashier for six months in Tipps Topvalues of Ireland Ltd.  It's RIPPS they should have called that dump with its worldwide reputation as Ireland's Emporium of the Rejects - First for Everything in Seconds.  Like nighties with necks so snug they'll garrot you in your sleep if you so much as twitch.  Or men's trousers with the crotch two inches from the pockets which must be a blessed relief to men with privates perched on their upper pelvis.

Not even in my most florid nightmares did I think I'd end up in a kip like Tipps when I left the grassy outpost of home in Dun-mo-Croi (population aiming for the 2,000 mark) and off to Dublin to blind them on stage and screen with my acting genius.  The minute I arrived I alerted all the theatres and RTE TV that Nellie Flanagan was gracing the metropolis with her presence and was available for suitable leading parts.  They said feel free to send in my glossy, my cuttings and an SASE which I thought was something fancy but only turned out to be a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope.

Cuttings? That was a good one.  At 17 they expect me to have a suitcase of reviews like some teen star.  I only had one from the Galway Monocle.  It went: ‘The Dun-mo-Croi Players did a solid job of ploughing through a ho-hum production of ‘You, Me and the Others’.   Nicolas Feeney showed definite merit in providing unexpected comedy in a dreary play.  (This was when Mr. Feeney dropped the iron on his toes and had to go through the play whimpering with pain.)  And Nellie Flanagan who tended to overwhelm her small part, nonetheless gave us her rendition of Atlas as she propped up the back wall of the set during the final act, thus obviating the total collapse of both play and stage.’

OK!  So I saved all on stage from being brained by a collapsing set. That wasn't the point.  I had a medium sized role in that play and that donkey reviewer Donnelly has the audacity to classify me as some kind of prop holder.  It's not the kind of review that is going to startle the makers and shakers in theatreland to come screeching over with sirens blaring to haul me away from the cash register in Tipps.  I hate critics and when I become a household name I am going to blow the whistle on that lot.  

They fired me from Tipps.  They said it lowered the standard to have one of their cashiers ‘hollering out' Shakespeare all day long.  Firstly, that dive doesn't have a standard to lower.   Secondly, I was elegantly declaiming my Shakespeare speeches – mainly from ‘Romeo and Juliet’.  I'm almost 18 and soon I'll be too old to play Juliet.  But when the call comes Nellie Flanagan will be wordperfect.

The day I was fired from Tipps I called up RTE TV again and that’s when they IMPLORED me to stop pestering them.  When I got home to Aunt Nora (she’s my Mam’s sister and puts me up for nothing) what did she say?  ‘The Lord is testing you for greater things’.  Aunt Nora is full of philosophical sayings.   Her top favourite is:  ‘The Good Lord never closes one door but He opens another’.  That’s what she told Clare Foley after she set the house on fire making flaming peaches as a treat for her boyfriend.  He's a picky eater because he works in a sausage factory and is on intimate terms with the blood and guts that go into Ireland's favourite food.  Clare was a bit too generous with the brandy.  One flick of the boyfriend's lighter and the peaches, the tablecloth and half the kitchen burst into flames.  SWOOSH! SWOOSH! The curtains disappeared.  (Never buy nylon curtains from Tipps!)  The flames ate most of the carpets.  By the time they remembered the number for the fire brigade the place was half gone.

And what was Aunt's Nora's reaction to the tragedy where both the back and the front doors had been burnt off the hinges?  ‘The Lord never closes one door, but He opens another.’  If their neighbour Mr. Donovan, who is very active in the St. Vincent de Paul Society hadn’t given them two doors for free, the Foleys would still be sitting in their shell of a home with the breezes swirling around them waiting for the Lord to deliver a few doors (windows and carpets) down from the Above.  

It wasn’t easy living with Aunt Nora no matter how much my Mam went on about how ‘very kind’ it was of her to put me up for free when any other girl from the country would have to pay through the nose to live in digs in Dublin.  But I paid!  Because Aunt Nora would be fine to live with if you're aiming to be a canonized Saint.  Not even the Pope and the College of Cardinals combined  squeezed as much praying into one day as Aunt Nora.

Every morning at dawn Aunt Nora hauled me out to early Mass.  Even in Holy Dublin this is not the place you’ll meet exciting people who’ll give you a break in theatre or highbrow films.  This is where you’ll find the likes of the lunatic twins who spend hours taking turns kissing the feet off all the statues in the Church.  One of these days those saints will just topple right over and kill them since the statues have hardly anything left to stand on.  Ever since the fire Mrs. Foley is there weeping oceans and removing the varnish off the pews imploring the Lord to provide a few curtains, carpets and blankets before the really cold weather sets in.  And there’s Aunt Nora yelling out the Mass, drowning out the priest and if there were any normal people in that Church I’d die of embarrassment.     

But early Mass is only a tiny taster to Aunt Nora.  Before breakfast we have to thank the Lord  - EFFUSIVELY – for the bounty we are about to receive.  By the time prayers are over, the eggs are stone cold and the tea is  stronger than Guinness.   After abundant prayers over breakfast, it’s into work on the bus with Valerie Vaughan who waits for me every single morning.  Valerie thinks that knitting is on a par with walking on water for excitement, and believes that Superman is going to fly into Tipps and haul her away from her cash register to Happy Bunny Land.  I don't blame her.  Anything would be better than working in Tipps.

The only way I can get through the day with my sanity intact is to rehearse my favourite speeches out loud and beam myself away from dreadful reality to a more sublime zone.  No matter how busy I am at that cash register I can declaim ‘To Be or not To Be’ without losing a beat and put more feeling into it than any actor living or dead.  Because I have suffered so many slings and arrows just by living in this green isle of 24-hour prayers and kips like Tipps.  Plus I've got an extra edge being a woman.  From what I've witnessed, it's the women who get slung at more often.

Most times I never get to finish my soliloquies.  Some cretin of a woman with more children hanging off her than jewellery off an Indian Princess wants to know where she can find a size 7 for Gary who’s chewing his way through his buggy.  I feel like telling her to go home, get in a large supply of Mr. Hefty, the heavy duty garbage bags, and wrap Gary the Gobbler in them until such time as he can distinguish between food and his buggy.  That way she'd save money and I won’t have to interrupt a divine speech and show her where the number 7's are - right in front of her eyeballs of course.

Some days I feel like hanging a sign around my neck - ‘Don't ask me.  I don't know.’  This would be appreciated in the US where things are more advanced I'm told, and where they'd realize that in the general scheme of things it would be far, far better for me to hone my art and get prepared for Broadway instead of acting like some signpost illuminating the way to the booties and the bonnets.

During the afternoon we get a fifteen-minute break.  I race to the phone to call every place in Ireland where they might give me a job acting.  Even the phone is against me.  It’s either broken, engaged, temporarily out of sorts, or it swallows my precious money.  On those rare days when I get through, they ask me how old and how tall I am.  When I say I’m almost 18 and five feet eleven inches, there's a long pause before they say ‘Thank you, dear,’ like I’m some kind of seconds myself, as if it’s my fault I'm as tall as I am.  After six months they had me convinced.  Pigs would be dancing minuets around the moon before they'd give Nellie Flanagan a break.

By the time I’m through phoning I’m so depressed I know I’ll be flat out dead before I ever get to play Juliet.  But then it five o’clock and Tipps is swarming with the lucky girls who come dashing in for their cheap tights so they can get all fussed up for an evening out on the town.  In the rush I forget about dying from depression and shooting and maiming all those low lives who keep rejecting me by saying that horrible phrase – ‘we’ll keep you in mind’  when what they really mean is ‘Take a hike, freak!’

I’m really busy clicking away on the cash register.  That clickety click CLACK (that’s me stapling the bill to the plastic bag) becomes second nature and takes my mind off everything.  It whisks me away to another zone and I’m a great actress being pelted with bouquets on Broadway and the West End.   I’m so mesmerized by the clickety click CLACK it’s a joy to be spouting my speeches out loud.

Finally it’s quitting time and the end of a nightmare day at Tipps.  The lights of Dublin are all shining red and the Guinness signs are glowing in front of cosy pubs.  Even the rain has a thrill to it that you’d never get in our village of Dun-Mo-Croi.  And I have a choice.  I can either hide out in the loo to escape getting on the bus with Valerie or risk getting locked in for the night.   Valerie thinks she’s ‘good for me’ by telling me several times a day that I should be resigned to the fact that I am never going to get anywhere because I don't know anyone and don't have any contacts in the theatre.  She says if I were only related to the Fondas or the Redgraves I wouldn't have to ‘plague’ them with Shakespeare at Tipps.

Most evenings I walk around Dublin in the rain trying to think of excuses why I shouldn’t go home to Aunt Nora for supper and endless prayers.  ‘I promised your Mother I’d look after you and I want you home immediately after work.’  I want to be like all the young students who spend their lives in the pubs near the Green.  When the despair overwhelms me I go in there just to feel the young excitement.  I buy a small gin and tonic and it’s an awful price to pay especially when all my money is going into the bank so I can go to Drama School – one day.  But in the student pubs the boys and girls my age all stick to their own little groups, as if it was forbidden to talk to outsiders.  

One evening, however, I met two drama students from Trinity College which is where I should be going if there were any money in the family.  The students were friendly as could be – until I mentioned that I came from a village where my Dad had a grocery shop and that I was working as a cashier in Tipps.  They edged away from me with false smiles before I could tell them I was a genius actress waiting to be discovered.  

Another evening I met a nice medical student who was from the country like myself.  He chatted to me about autopsies and having to cut into a dead person's eyes.  He was in the middle of a great grisly story about a head that went missing in the hospital when his girl friend waltzed in.  There were javelins coming out her eyeballs when she saw the two of us laughing.  That was that.  I’m left gazing down at my expensive gin and tonic wondering what happened to the head and when and where I will get to meet the throbbingly interesting people in this city.  

I buy mints to cover the smell of gin because Aunt Nora can sniff out liquor ten miles off.  I drag myself home for supper.  Aunt Nora says Grace Before, Grace in Between, Grace After.  I have to listen to Tales of Starvation and Horror worldwide while we do the dishes.  This merriment is followed by a few rosaries on our knees.  After that I no longer care if I live to see 18.   l hunch in front of the TV and watch all those people acting.  Zillions of actresses - younger than me, older than me, prettier than me, uglier, more exotic, less gifted than me - but none, none taller than me.  So when they're casting around for ‘The Return of the Giants’ I may get my break.  

Before we go to bed I have to traipse all over the house with Aunt Nora while she goes from room to room drenching them with Holy Water to ward off burglars and rapists.  She always warns me not to forget to say my Act of Contrition   …  in case I make medical history and die of a heart attack at 17.  Before I fall asleep I always beg the Good Lord to please get me into acting soon before I die of depression in Dublin where all my dreams were supposed to come true.  

My prayers were heard.  I didn’t die from depression.  They fired me from Tipps.